5 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



visiting Americans are indebted for many kindnesses. The clerks 

 and tallymen at the ports, the superintendents and overseers, or 

 " head bushers," on the cultivations are chiefly white, Creole, or 

 mulatto Jamaicans. A parenthesis here about this word " Creole." 

 Webster and others define a Creole as a child of white parents born 

 in the tropics ; but this certainly is not the popular use of the 

 term in Jamaica. There it is synonymous with the perhaps com- 

 moner expression " brown man," and is applied to a person with a 

 small proportion of negro blood, which, while showing its presence 

 slightly in complexion or hair, or both, still distinguishes its pos- 

 sessor but slightly from a white person. These people are far 

 more numerous than the whites in Jamaica, and enjoy complete 

 social equality with them. This is not only fortunate for all con- 

 cerned, but is the inevitable result of the free intermarriage of 

 persons of all shades of complexion and all degrees of blood mix- 

 ture, as well as of the looser relations which were even recently 

 very common, but which, happily, seem at present to be less con- 

 doned among people with claims to respectability. One always 

 finds Jamaicans of the better class kindly, hospitable, polite, and 

 unaffected, without the veneer of more elaborate civilization. 



But the manual labor in any industry is largely performed by 

 the negro peasantry, who constitute a very large and steadily in- 

 creasing majority of the population of the island. In the culture 

 and shipment of the banana both men and women were formerly 

 employed, but at present men are almost exclusively engaged, re- 

 ceiving from one to two shillings per day, according to the work. 

 There is much of interest about the Jamaica negro some good 

 points and many bad ones ; but this is not the occasion for their 

 detailed discussion. His life is a curious combination of almost 

 primitive savagery, with some of the least attractive features of 

 our so-called civilization. Living chiefly in wattled bamboo huts 

 thatched with palm leaves, and upon the lavish products of the 

 soil, dressing in the simplest manner, his wants are easily supplied. 

 Very religious in theory and equally immoral in practice, a child 

 in mind and an animal in spirit, he presents a practical problem 

 worthy of any philanthropist's best efforts. 



The short time in which, even at his small wages, he can pro- 

 vide for the needs of a week, his entire lack of ambition for more 

 than a bare subsistence, and the seductions of that liquid fire called 

 new rum, make the average negro an uncertain quantity in the. 

 labor problem. This has led to the importation into the British 

 West Indies of a class of steadier and more reliable laborers, the 

 low-caste Hindus, or coolies, from India. These slender-limbed 

 and bronze-skinned Caucasians are, as a class, temperate, indus- 

 trious, and frugal ; quiet and peaceable when fairly treated. They 

 make excellent laborers, and their picturesque and comfortable 



